A review of theories of human amnesia

Stern, Leonard D.

doi:10.3758/bf03196959

Cited by 37 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 68 publications

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“…Thus, the hypothesis that directed forgetting involves disrupted retrieval provides a link with the literature on posthypnotic amnesia, suggesting that at least one of the underlying mechanisms is similar in the two situations in spite of the dramatic procedural differences. The inability of subjects to classify the F items as first list-half words is also consistent with the conclusion of Stern (1981) that human amnesia can, in some cases, be attributed to a context retrieval deficit.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 86%

Disrupted retrieval in directed forgetting: A link with posthypnotic amnesia.

Geiselman¹,

Bjork²,

Fishman³

1983

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

300

398

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Certain reliable findings from research on directed forgetting seem difficult to accommodate in terms of the theoretical processes, such as selective rehearsal or storage differentiation, that have been put forward to account for directed-forx getting phenomena. Some kind of "missing mechanism" appears to be involved.In order to circumvent the methodological constraints that have limited the conclusions investigators could draw from past experiments, a new paradigm is introduced herein that includes a mixture of intentional and incidental learning. With this paradigm, a midlist instruction to forget the first half of a list was found to reduce later recall of the items learned incidentally as well as those learned intentionally. This result suggests that a cue to forget can lead to a disruption of retrieval processes as well as to the alteration of encoding processes postulated in prior theories. The results also provide a link between intentional forgetting and the literature on posthypnotic amnesia, in which disrupted retrieval has been implicated. With each of these procedures, the information that can be remembered is typically recalled out of order and often with limited recollection for when the information had been presented. It therefore was concluded here that retrieval inhibition plays a significant role in nonhypnotic as well as in hypnotic instances of directed forgetting. The usefulness of retrieval inhibition as a mechanism for memory updating was also discussed.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 86%

Disrupted retrieval in directed forgetting: A link with posthypnotic amnesia.

Geiselman¹,

Bjork²,

Fishman³

1983

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

300

398

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“…One way to account for the exaggerated negative transfer in earlier studies and the results of the present research is to consider the deficit resulting from surgical destruction of hippocampus as similar to the cueutilization impairments seen in human amnesics (Stern, 1981;Weiskrantz & Warrington, 1975;Winocur & Kinsbourne, 1978;Winocur & Weiskrantz, 1976). Hippocampal animals and human amnesics seem to have what amounts to an inability to adequately edit their responses in a variety of cognitive tasks.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 73%

Role of retroactive interference in the spatial memory of normal rats and rats with hippocampal lesions.

Jarrard¹,

Elmes²

1982

Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology

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The importance of retroactive interference (RI) in memory for spatial locations was studied by using a 12-arm radial maze and a standard RI paradigm. Animals in the RI condition first learned to choose 4 of the 12 arms, followed by training to a second set of 4 arms. In the control condition for interference, rats learned the first set of arms but were not trained to approach the second set. Thereafter, animals in each interference condition were assigned to groups (hippocampal, cortical control, unoperated control), the operations were carried out, and then all animals were tested for retention of the set of arms learned first. Contrary to predictions of the cognitive map theory, O' Keefe & Nadel, 1978), RI was found in control animals. The severe memory deficit found in hippocampals was not influenced by the interference variable. In addition to impaired performance early in relearning, rats with hippocampal lesions continued to make many errors throughout the 10 wk of testing, including choices to unbaited arms and repeated entries into baited arms. However, hippocampals eventually learned not to reenter unbaited arms. These data indicate a deficit in the selection and utilization of sets of responses and are interpreted as implicating the hippocampus in retrieval processes.

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“…First of all, the etiology of anterograde amnesia in humans is very diverse. For example, patients suffering from Korsakoff's syndrome, Alzeheimer's disease, "transient global amnesia" syndrome, surgieal or accidental destruction of brain tissue, or concussive injury, as well as those receiving electroconvulsive shock therapy, have been included in studies on amnesia in humans (e.g., see Butters & Cermak, 1980;Hirst, 1982;Markowitsch, 1983;Schacter & Crovitz, 1977;Squire & Slater, 1978;Stern, 1981). It is now clear that the deficits exhibited by these different classes of patients are often different (Squire, 1981(Squire, , 1982Weingartner, Grafman, Boutelle, Kaye, & Martin, 1983).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%